And I remind them of our native land. They’re silent, then they sing, then they rejoin the battle. 103 Slutsky’s friend David Samoilov was his company’s Komsomol leader. While waiting to go to the front, he wrote a paper on Tolstoy’s War and Peace . What I (and perhaps someone before me) was trying to do was discern— through Tolstoy’s eyes—the shape of socialism, of social equality, in the structure of the patriotic war. . . . A literary young man was seeking a confirmation of his state not in life, which he did not know, but in literature, which provided a firm support for the spirit. The point (as I sensed very deeply) was to leave behind the idea of intelligentsia exclusivity, or rather, the idea of the primacy of obligations over rights. I needed to shed this idea, which had been instilled in me—unwittingly—by my environment, upbringing, education, the IFLI elitism, and my dream of poetic talent and special election. 104 He found exactly what he was looking for: the Great Patriotic War as a reenactment of the Patriotic War of 1812 and his own spiritual journey as a reflection of Pierre Bezukhov’s—and possibly of Babel’s, too, for the story of the Jewish runt’s “awakening” is but an ethnic version of the canonical Mercurian-Apollonian (intelligentsia-people) encounter. “The exhilaration I felt,” wrote Samoilov, “came from the feeling of having common duties shared by all, and at the same time from the perception of a special value of my own individuality as equal to any other.” Before long, Samoilov found his very own Platon Karataev and his very own Efim Nikitich Smolich. “The only person in our unit who truly revered spirituality and knowledge was Semyon Andreevich Kosov, a plowman from the Altai. A man of large stature and enormous strength, he felt a special tenderness for all those weaker than he was, be they animals or human beings. He suffered from hunger more than anyone else, and sometimes I would give Semyon my soup, while he would hide a tiny lump of sugar for me. But it was not this exchange that sustained our friendship—it was the mutual attraction of the strong and the weak.” 105 Samoilov combined weakness with knowledge because he was a Russian intelligent and because he was a Jew. For him, the “Russian people” he loved and wanted to share duties with were both an alien tribe (the Russians) and an alien class (the people). This was an old Romantic equation, of course, but it seems to have been more passionately felt by first-generation intelligentsia